Trump wins a second term. And, Republicans reclaim Senate control
IN what will be the most historic comeback in political history, coming off four years ago, when he lost.
Four years after he left Washington as a pariah, when his attempt to overturn the 2020 election to hold onto the office had all but disqualified him from re-election, Trump’s come-from-behind victory has defied two assassination attempts, two presidential impeachments, his criminal conviction, and many other criminal charges.
Trump vowed at his Mar-a-Lago resort early Wednesday to “heal” the nation, to fix its borders and to deliver a strong and prosperous economy after millions of his voters turned to him amid frustration over high prices for food and housing and embraced his plans for a crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
“I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honor of being elected your 47th president and your 45th president,” said Trump, only the second president to win a nonconsecutive term. “This will truly be the golden age of America.”
But Trump’s new mandate will raise fresh fears that he plans to follow through on his belief that presidents enjoy almost unlimited authority. He campaigned promising to wield a new White House term to effect “retribution” and has spoken freely of wielding America’s governing institutions, and even the military, to punish his enemies. He vowed to begin a mass deportation of illegal, and even some legal, immigrants that could ignite a showdown.
Trump’s victory after the state of Wisconsin threw him over the top as he secured the 270 electoral votes required to be elected president. His victory marked the end of a very desperate effort by Democrats who had sought to halt him from going back to power – an effort that rushed the elevation of Vice President Kamala Harris to party nomination after already unpopular President Joe Biden’s disastrous performance against the debate against Trump held way back in June.
The former president outpaced his own performance in a losing cause four years ago, putting the states of Georgia and Pennsylvania back into the GOP column and retaining North Carolina for his party—all of which Democrats had targeted as part of the vice president’s path to the White House.
Trump campaigned on searing authoritarian-style rhetoric and false claims that the nation’s towns and cities were under “occupation” from foreign criminals and gangs. But he also tapped into a palpable thirst for change among Americans still feeling the painful aftereffects of a now-cooled run of high inflation. And he warned that only he could stop a slide to World War III as foreign crises rage.
He promised to build the world’s greatest economy and make life less expensive for working Americans, forming the populist base of the transformed Republican Party. His followers perceive Trump as a figure that will express his crude, occasionally vulgarity laced, and very often racially provocative rhetoric that has presented him as an scourge against political correctness. But the drama of the final days of the campaign dominating the debate over whether Trump is a “fascist” reflects the new challenges he’s likely to present to democratic guarantees and presidential decorum in the years ahead and the fear of at least half the electorate who voted for Harris that he intends to establish authoritarian-style rule.
Trump’s victory is also likely to trigger the ouster of special counsel Jack Smith and will mean that the president-elect paid no electoral price for his attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 election, which culminated in his supporters’ mob attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
After years pounding on Biden’s age, Trump, at 78, is now the oldest man elected president,and his every act and utterance as commander in chief is likely to be scrutinized for signs of age-related slowing down or cognitive issues.
His campaign was extreme; his election may well augur a period of national and international turmoil. He’s promised to spend his second term looking for “retribution” against his political opponents and spoken publicly about using the military against “the enemy from within.” The rest of the world’s US allies are bracing for a return of the wild unpredictability in US foreign policy that Trump whipped up during his first term. There also are doubts about his readiness to commit to NATO’s bedrock principle of mutual defense.
But the billionaire real estate tycoon and former reality star’s victory, premised on a peerless command of the GOP, is undisputably making Trump become one of the most relevant political figures in American history. It marks his electoral triumph in 2016 as anything but an aberration: on the contrary, the greatest realignment in the home front of the US and its standing within the world. It also means it will no longer be how Biden’s legacy will recount the triumph of evicting Trump from power in 2020, but his hubris at the time to want a second term that would have been over when he is 86 years old. That opened again one more time to his rival.
And Trump’s victory also means that, once again, he stood in the way of realizing the hopes of millions of Americans for a female president, since his triumph over Harris follows his 2016 defeat of Hillary Clinton, again blocking the shattering of what she called “the highest, hardest glass ceiling” in U.S. politics.
Trump’s false assertions that he was illegally ousted from power in 2020 served as the foundation of his return four years later, since millions of Americans were buying into his alternate reality. The ex-president’s defiance-and his ability to weaponize charges against him-was perhaps best illustrated by the way he seized on his mug shot, taken in a Georgia jail after he was indicted over election interference in the state. He made the picture a political rallying cry for a primary campaign previously bereft of juice, using subsequent legal woes-the the criminal conviction in Manhattan in a hush money case-to keep his base energized by charging that is what they were indicting him for. When the assassin’s bullet at a Pennsylvania rally grazed his scalp, he walked up the steps of his supporters and told them to “fight, fight, fight.” His sense of indestructibility – and the almost divine purpose felt by many of his supporters – was thus reinforced.
The promises that Trump made on the campaign trail leave many Americans braced for one of the most disruptive and divisive periods in the country’s modern memory. Trump promised to immediately launch the biggest deportation operation in history on Day 1-targeting undocumented immigrants and legal Haitian refugees whom he falsely accused of eating the pets of Ohio residents. In his vision of a sea change in the US economic structure, he is going to impose broad-brush tariffs on foreign imports that will be especially punitive on goods from China, something that will send shock waves around the world.
Republicans have already retaken the Senate, C which means the president-elect will have tremendous leeway to finish his plan to remake the judiciary and ensure conservative legal dominance for generations. The fight for the House of Representatives remains fluid, but if Republicans can hold onto their slim majority, Trump will have few impediments to his rule in Washington.
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A lawless presidency?
Trump and his supporters were clear to articulate that they feel he was throttled by his truest instincts in his first term because of the people in Washington who held power over him. As a result, Trump and his dedicated followers designed a set of policies to effectively tear asunder some administrative branches within the federal government, including replacing most of those civil servants with loyal partisans. Trump has also promised to purge the top ranks of officials at the Justice Department and in the intelligence agencies whom he believes are arrayed against him.
His moves will likely trigger a battle over the scope of presidential authority between the White House and the courts. But in this field of political science, all his efforts at armoring instruments of government against personal or political exigencies and persecutions against opponents may strongly put the concept of rule of law under strain. But Trump has never tried to hide the fact that he intends to fully seize hold of this summer’s Supreme Court decision granting commanders in chief extraordinary immunity for White House official acts and bolstering claims, already dubious in places, that the president remains essentially unchecked.
Trump’s own re-election is similarly ensured to put an end to federal prosecutions that came into existence from his effort to steal the 2020 election. The case, brought by Smith on election interference and his appeal to revive a trial over Trump’s hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, will be ended with Trump’s new attorney general. The status of the state prosecution in Georgia is murkier but likely to end up in a battle of law as to whether a state can indeed try a sitting president. Trump has indicated that he would pardon any supporters convicted and jailed over their role in the insurrection at the US Capitol.
Outside America, Trump will most likely repeat what he did for eight years in the presidency-put the United States once again on the list of the world’s most major sources of unpredictability. A foreign policy that looks like a mercurial personality is to be expected that will pull Washington further and further from a position it has had since the victory over Adolf Hitler in the Second World War as leader of a rules-based democratic world order. His pledge is to end Ukraine from war soon after taking office. His affection for Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he referred to as a “genius” during the campaign, imperils a resolution that would validate the Kremlin’s lawless and bloody invasion of a free and independent democracy. That would cast doubt on America’s future appeasement of foreign autocrats and its long history of defending the territorial integrity of its allies in Europe and the Pacific, NATO partners and Taiwan.
The president-elect has not shifted his stance that American allies have freeloaded off US security guarantees for decades, and he is likely to apply intense pressure on them to do more to ensure their own means of defense. Some observers credit him with forcing NATO nations to strengthen their own military capacity in his first term. And his electoral victory is bound to bode well for Israel as it continues waging its wars both against Hamas in Gaza and against Hezbollah in Lebanon. It will also find support from some of the countries in the Gulf, who agreed on extreme hardline policy towards Iran as followed by Trump during his tenure. His supporters are hopeful that he will put right the weakness they think he portrayed abroad, particularly over the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan on the watch of Biden.
A new test for a rattled national psyche.
Trump, if he completes his four-year second term, will go down in history as the oldest sitting president in history, a milestone that will be rich in irony since his relentless attacks on Biden’s age and mental faculties paved the way for his successor’s exit from the political stage.
During the campaign, mental lapses and erratic conduct on the part of Trump only fed speculation about his health and cognition – a theme likely to last throughout his second presidency. And former president’s undimmed habit of inserting himself into every cultural and political debate and his incessant zeal for igniting clashes with his political and personal adversaries promise another test for the national psyche.
Ohio senator JD Vance will meet President-elect Donald Trump at the White House: As the candidate who emerged in his campaign as a potential future heir to Trumpism, he fervently defended his new boss. Pence is persona non grata in the Republican Party after refusing to comply with Trump’s demand that he stop the Constitution and change the result of the 2020 election through certification.
He is the only second president since Grover Cleveland in 1892 to claim a second term after losing reelection.
His supporters will be watching with great eagerness – as millions of other Americans will watch with fear – as he gives the second version of his “American carnage” inaugural address from 2017 when he raises his right hand to swear to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution in January.